Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So two weeks ago, I shared one of the first oil pastel pieces I've ever done since I started taking up drawing again. I was experimenting with a whole new medium and new technique so I decided to check out some youtube tutorials and I ended up making this!
I was really surprised with how well it turned out and despite a few hiccups along the way, I thought it looked really good! Especially for a first try with a new medium.
So I decided to do another similar piece!
I was browsing my Facebook feed when I came across a post from a Avatar The Last Airbender facebook group, talking about Sokka and Yue as the wolf and the moon. If you're familiar with the show you know what I'm talking about, but if you don't I highly recommend watching it!
Source: Reddit
It blew my mind when I realised this connection. And when I saw this tutorial by Art Arena I just knew I had to try it out.
Mine would be slightly different since I was gonna do mine portrait instead of landscape, but it's still about the same. So following the video, we start by sketching the wolf and the moon.
I liked this tutorial better than the last since I found out that markers don't work as well on oil pastels. So drawing and outlining the wolf and the cliff would circumvent that problem entirely.
I did reference a couple of stock images for the wolf silhouette though because I was having some trouble getting it right.
After that everything was pretty much smooth-sailing; the shading was easy enough.
Then was the fun part; colouring with oil pastels! Of course you'd follow the general rule which is start light then go dark. So I coloured in the pink first. But eventually you'd get something like this:
Then like the video suggests, just take a piece of thick tissue (I recommend kitchen towel) and blend away!
Unfortunately I think I ended up blending a little too much so the blue kinda exceed the bottom right corner and ruined the border I had going. I didn't have my painter's tape at the time and I should've bought some but oh well.
Btw the reason I did this in portrait was because I only used half of my drawing block for the last one so I wouldn't have to blend too much. And they would end up side by side like this:
Which do you like better?
I think in general oil pastels are definitely easier than paints since it covers a large area more quickly. And you don't really need to mess about with mixing colours since oil pastels cannot be mixed. I mean, you can blend them but that's about it. And since they're equally messy there's not much difference in cleanup time.
So if you're thinking of trying out something new, I definitely recommend oil pastels! They're easy to use and are generally quite cheap compared to paints. And there are plenty of simple tutorials like these you can find on youtube! They're also good activities for kids since they're so easy and don't take up much time. Each of these pieces took my less than 10 minutes!
Trying these out definitely inspired me to think of my own pieces to try and I have done a few since then! Stay tuned to check those out!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
